


Sinking, Feeling

by aeyria



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Communication, Emotional Support Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, No beta we fall like Crowley, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Post-Canon, Snake Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 11:40:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25969030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeyria/pseuds/aeyria
Summary: Sometimes healing is a matter of holding each other through the thick of it.orAziraphale has trouble asking for things. Crowley is there to bring him back down to earth.orCrowley the weighted snlanket.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 108





	Sinking, Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap.
> 
> This is entirely self indulgent.

There’s something to be said for having a giant demonic snake as one’s partner. 

‘Hold me’ he wants to say, as he watches the currently human shaped being wobble his way back over to the sofa clutching a new bottle of wine. This is their second bottle of the night, and likely not the last. He takes a drink from his half emptied glass, feeling it go down in time with Crowley’s serpentine slide down into his seat. There’s plenty of space to share if Aziraphale were to join him. 

‘Hold me,’ he wants to say. Maybe it’s the alcohol that’s making him feel like this. Making him feel so untethered. He wants to be pressed close, wants to bury himself in the tangle of Crowley’s arms and just let himself be held. The words press at his throat like a flower trying to unfurl. 

‘Hold me.’ It is a thought as lovely as it is deadly. Or isn’t it? His fingers twitch against the glass in his hand. He watches as minute ripples make their way across the blood red surface of the liquid. If he tries, he can pretend he is looking inside himself, at the alcohol rich blood bubbling in veins that threaten to burst if he does not release the tension. A dam fit to burst; a tea kettle set boil with no hole through which to whistle. 

‘Hold me.’ His body refuses to cooperate. Crowley is talking about something, a passionate ramble about ducks or perhaps disco, but he sounds like he is coming through water. It’s impossible to focus when his head feels stuffed with cotton, when said cotton has the weight of a cloud and is threatening to lift him up and irretrievably away into the sky. 

‘Hold me,’ he wants to plead. ‘There’s no place for me up there.’ 

Heaven and Hell have let them walk free, but he doesn’t feel free. He feels trapped in a game he doesn’t know the rules of. Or maybe he feels too free. Maybe the rules are that he’s free to make his own now. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Angels were made to follow rules, not to make them. Then again, angels weren’t made to want either.

‘Hold me.’ They are two words and the desire of his entire being; and he could have it, if only he could make himself speak. He knows Crowley would welcome the chance for contact if he asked. Crowley leans into touch like a flower seeking sunlight, curls into it like serpent seeking heat. Aziraphale could ask and Crowley would say yes, and he would crawl into those arms and all would be right. But, he cannot. Cannot get- make- allow himself to ask. Six thousand years have trained him too well. 

The room is too quiet. He realizes belatedly that Crowley is staring at him, clearly waiting on an answer to something he had asked. What did he say? The past ten minutes are an empty hole of static in his memory. He‘s not even sure what the topic was. He tries to speak but the words attempting to clarify get lodged behind the question already caught there. Something strangled comes out, and he’s not sure it isn’t his own heart. 

‘Hold me?’ Crowley’s thin snake-like tongue darts out and scents the air. Two quick flicks, then a moment as he considers. Then he slips out of his seat and crosses the room. Aziraphale doesn’t see where goes. 

‘Hold me?’ He thinks that if he could just reach down his throat, then he could grasp the words he wants to say and pull them out by force. He could drag them into corporeality and present a bouquet written in the language of flowers, a message that doesn’t require words or throats to be heard. It would be small, a stifled thing suffocated by fear and years of practice, but at least it would be out. 

‘Hold me?’ The world has been reduced to mere smudges and swirls of sensation. There is a detached part of him that recognizes what is happening, but naming the thing is only half the battle, and everything else in him is focused on the attack. Distantly, he realizes he is shaking. The wine glass in his hands has graduated from ripples to waves, the earthquake tremors coming from deep within him, but he can’t seem to make himself move to put it down. He is afraid of what he’ll do if he releases his hold. 

‘Hold me?’ There is a flicker of something by his jaw, something light and almost imperceptible amidst the rush and roar of anxiety, and then he feels a smooth slide of scales brushing against the bare skin of his neck. Pressure. It’s not enough, not nearly enough, but more follows behind it until there is a slow and steady heaping of weight winding its way down into his lap and back up across his chest. He is sinking. Crowley’s head curls around his shoulders and settles into the crook of his neck, gently nosing upward as he adjusts his position to give a gentle squeeze. He is landing.

It is a slow process. Silt settling on a riverbed, particles coalescing even as the current threatens to whisk them up and away again. It is gradual, but eventual. In and out, down and down. Every breath is met by a firm pressure in counter that promises him that he will not float away. That he is safe. 

“I’ve got you, angel. I’m right here.” It is a promise he can feel, in more ways than one. 

Squeeze, squeeze, pulse. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Squeeze. Pause. Squeeze, pulse, squeeze, squeeze. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Pulse, pulse, squeeze.[1]

He has a mind primed to find patterns. This is a simple one. Just a series of dots and dashes on paper. He remembers learning the code more than a century ago, another wordless language, introduced independent of the one using it now. It had been used for crueler things back then: tactics and sabotage. Rescues, too, though apparently not his own. Crowley had simply moved back then. Just as he does now.

Pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse. Pulse. Pulse, squeeze, pulse. Pulse.[2]

The pattern is a loop, passing from one phrase to the other and back again in seamless order. He’s not sure how many times it repeats, only that at some point his hindbrain manages to overcome his forebrain, and now his hand is tapping a section of scaled spine in time with its constrictions. 

Dit, dit, dit, dit. Dit. Dit, dah, dit. Dit.

Slowly, details of his surroundings begin to filter back in. The tick of the grandfather clock in the corner. The gentle glow of amber lights. The smell of wine, and biscuits, and books. Some details have changed since he last was aware. Whatever had been playing earlier in the night is now shut off. The glass that had been in his hand is now resting on the table. The bottles they had been drinking from are once again half full. 

With a thought, the other half of their contents return from his system. The lingering taste is stale on his tongue, but it is a familiar foe, coaxing his mouth into motion before he can think to fear what might escape. Sobriety hits and he groans. 

“Are you back, angel?” This time he can hear the words, whispers against his ears as well as his mind. Crowley’s voice always dips into the ethereal in this form, but there’s an unmistakable hiss on this plane that he’s learned to listen for. He twists his head to find Crowley staring at him, tongue flicking but otherwise observing in total stillness. 

”Yes,” he says at last. His voice is weak, choked for all the words he wants to say but can’t. But he can speak. He is present. “Yes. Thank you.” 

Crowley presses his nose to Aziraphale’s own. It is a gentle tap, acknowledgement and greeting the way some birds and other creatures do. 

“There are other ways to ask for it, you know. Doesn’t have to be words.” 

He pushes his head into the cup of Aziraphale’s palm and Aziraphale strokes his thumb over the smooth scales. It is a gesture as much for himself as it is for the demon. He wants to touch, and so he lets himself be shown where and how by the curves of Crowley’s form. Some nail scraped behind his jaw; a bit of pressure around his neck; just the pads near his nose. Crowley pushes and pulls away like a dance, and Aziraphale, who knows a thing or two about partner dancing, follows his lead without hesitation.

“Yes,” he sighs. “I know. It’s just...” It’s hard, he wants to say. But that’s not an explanation, nor is it an excuse. “Do you remember,” he asks instead, “the incident with the paintball guns after Warlock’s birthday party?”

“The— wait, what?” Crowley pulls his head from beneath Aziraphale’s hand, leaving him cold and bereft. He lets it go. 

“When we went to your old convent—“ he tries. 

“—Yes, I remember what happened; you toppled into the rhododendrons and made a fuss about getting paint on your coat. Hard to forget, that. What’s that got to do with this though?”

“Well, it’s like the stain.” He pauses, waiting for a sign of recognition or understanding. None are forthcoming. He tries again. “You see, I would always know it was there. Even after it’s gone.”

“So you want me to...?” He can feel the metaphysical eyebrow being raised at him but he can’t bring himself to address it. 

“No, no, not this time. I’m afraid I’ve already done the miracling away myself, unfortunately. Or rather, I suppose it was you in my guise while I was in yours.” His fingers itch for more contact, but Crowley is still holding his head away to study him, golden eyes holding him in silent regard as he searches Aziraphale’s face. 

“...Are you talking about Heaven?” 

Aziraphale nods, throat threatening to close again. 

“I can’t believe they’re gone,” he whispers. The admission threatens to bring the world crashing down around him just as it promises to lift it off his shoulders for the first time since creation. “I know that Heaven and Hell promised to leave us alone but I _can’t_ believe that they’re actually gone.“ Can’t believe they’re actually free.

It’s a funny thing, belief. Aziraphale is a being practically made of it, and yet he can’t convince himself to believe in this one blessed fact. They’re free, they’re safe, there’s no one watching anymore and yet he feels like there is, like at any moment now a memento will show up on his desk or there’ll be a knock at the door and this time he won’t be able to stop them from taking everything he has sacrificed so much to protect. 

‘I can’t, I can’t. You’re too precious to me to risk.’

Memories of a tartan thermos and a bathtub in Hell flash through his mind. Burns he’d cleaned after the soot and smoke had cleared. An empty bench that had felt too big for his body and too empty for the future. The slow crawl of time, the gnawing fear, fear that still eats away at him every day because what if—

Crowley squeezes him, hard. The coils tighten against the irregular heaving of his chest and it feels like drowning but Crowley holds him fast against the new tide of panic. Stop. Still. He forces the clench of fear to ease, and little by little, the coils loosen with him.

There’s no message encoded within the contact this time, at least not one so explicit. Just, stop. Just be still. Just be. Just a grounding anchor to the present. 

What is the present? 

It is an angel, and a demon, and the permission at last to be. To say yes. It is a world that has not ended, a bookshop and a Bentley that have not burned. It is the slow accumulation of plants around the bookshop and books around the flat. It is home. 

Our Side, he thinks. 

This is Our Side. 

He takes a breath and musters up the courage to speak. “Can we stay like this? Just for a little while? Of course, if you don’t want to then—“

“Hey, none of that,” Crowley admonishes. Aziraphale immediately snaps his jaw shut, and the demon’s tone softens. “The answer’s yes you know; of course it is. We can stay here as long as you’d like. D’you want me human shaped or—?”

“Like this, please.” He loves Crowley in any form, but there’s a certain weight and spread to him as a snake that Aziraphale needs right now. Crowley gives a soft hiss of approval and curls himself closer. 

“Whatever you want, angel. I’m here for you.”

And he is. Just like he always has been. Crowley is here, and Aziraphale is with him, and for first time in a long time, Aziraphale lets himself believe that everything will be all right. Not perfect, and not today, of course. Not next month. Not even next decade, if he’s honest. Trauma is a tricky thing, and both of them have over six millennia of it to work through. But someday, one day in the very distant, but very probably future, they will be all right. 

Crowley makes a contented noise from his place nestled against Aziraphale's collar bone. Just above his heart. 

“Thank you,” Crowley says, “For asking. ‘m proud of you.”

Aziraphale smiles and brings his hand to stroke his partner’s head. 

Yes, he thinks, he could get used to this. He wants to. It won’t be easy. It won’t be fast, it won’t be pretty. But they will have each other this time, and they will build and cross those bridges together. And in the end, in that new beginning, he knows that it all will be worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> [1]. Got you.  
> [2]. Here.


End file.
